On Black Friday in 2024, one of Australia's largest pharmacy websites went down. The old platform had survived for more than fifteen years, accumulating customisations the way a garage accumulates mystery cables: every one seemed important, and nobody wished to pull the wrong plug. A failure on the busiest shopping day supplied the answer. Chemist Warehouse would rebuild. The new system would be faster and more flexible. It would also place thousands of products, hundreds of categories, three pharmacy brands, and a considerable stream of organic revenue in motion at once.
This is the moment when Optimising earns its fee. The Melbourne agency does not design the packaging or buy television spots. It studies the quiet machinery between a question and an answer - URLs, redirects, taxonomies, render paths, location pages, headings, links. During the 18-month Chemist Warehouse project, its team sat inside the build with retailer and developer Convert Digital, joining weekly meetings, testing staging environments, and arguing about decisions while those decisions were still cheap to change. At launch, organic performance held. Afterward, the three-brand network recorded 75% organic traffic growth, a 40% higher conversion rate year on year, and 27% more orders.
The most expensive SEO mistake is often a perfectly reasonable engineering decision made in a room where nobody owns search.
The business of being found
Daniel Zuccon and James Richardson founded Optimising in 2008. The agency eventually made a counterintuitive choice: specialise. While competitors assembled broad menus of media, creative, social, and development, Optimising concentrated on SEO. Today that includes technical audits, ongoing campaigns, content strategy, digital PR, local search, Shopify work, and high-risk website migrations. It also includes AI visibility audits and “generative engine optimisation” - the attempt to be cited or recommended in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
The interface changed; the client anxiety did not. A retailer still wants to know whether a customer can find the right product. A franchise still needs every suburb to discover its nearest operator. A chief marketing officer still wants revenue rather than a handsome chart of impressions. Optimising's business appears to mix scoped audits and migrations with continuing campaign retainers. It does not publish a price list, which makes sense: redirecting a modest Shopify catalogue and safeguarding a three-brand pharmacy network are not variations of the same parcel.
Chemist Warehouse network
adidas APAC
Cake Decorating Central
Its customer list shows the shape of the work: adidas across Asia-Pacific, more than 500 pharmacy stores, over 150 Nando's restaurants, Jim's Mowing franchises across every Australian state and territory, plus smaller ecommerce brands. These are businesses where search is not a decorative marketing channel. It is a routing system. The same query may need to land on a product page, a local outlet, a cost calculator, or a piece of advice - and do so without creating 10,000 near-duplicate pages along the way.
What broke, what changed
The useful part of an agency case study is not the victorious percentage. It is the failure that made intervention unavoidable. At Chemist Warehouse, the legacy platform became difficult to update and unreliable under peak demand. Sister brands Amcal and Discount Drug Stores had already lost visibility during earlier platform changes. At Cake Decorating Central, an outdated Magento site trailed competitors while its founders lacked the time and resources to rebuild it alone.
The responses were procedural. For the cake retailer, Optimising and Shopify developer The Hope Factory installed analytics and keyword tracking, mapped old URLs to new ones, checked content themes, carried metadata forward, and validated the sitemap before launch. Then the agency added SEO and paid search. Within three months, revenue rose 434% and average order value 313%. Those figures are impressive, but they do not prove that redirects are an ATM. The shop had customer demand, a refreshed buying experience, paid media, and a business able to fulfil more orders. Remove those conditions and the same checklist produces a tidy migration, not a miracle.
Nando's presented the opposite problem: not one dangerous launch but 150 local markets. Optimising built a repeatable system of restaurant landing pages, Google Business Profiles, Apple Maps listings, and suburb-specific content. It also defended branded searches for menus, delivery, sauces, and recipes from ads and third-party pages. The campaign has held number-one positions in important chicken searches over a five-year engagement. The lesson is mundane and portable: treat local search as operations, not as 150 bursts of copywriting inspiration.
One percent is a number, not a mood
SEO has a reputation problem. The industry has sold invisible labour, secret formulas, and links of mysterious provenance. Optimising counters with transparency, but its more interesting claim sits outside marketing. Since October 2021, it has been a certified B Corporation. It commits at least one percent of gross revenue - not profit - to vetted environmental nonprofits, directs at least half its expenses toward independent local suppliers, and says it contributes hundreds of hours of pro-bono search work each year.
Certification changed paperwork before it changed poetry. The company formalised policies and processes, then shared the changes with employees. That is a useful detail because values usually fail in the handoff between a founder's intention and Tuesday afternoon's purchasing decision. A percentage of gross revenue removes one excuse. It costs more when the agency earns more and cannot vanish because profit was inconveniently thin.
In 2025, the pledge acquired whiskers. Optimising partnered with Odonata Foundation to support the Eastern Barred Bandicoot, a small marsupial that can turn over roughly three tonnes of soil a year while foraging. Odonata's sanctuaries protect much of the stable mainland population. The agency nicknamed the animal “Crash.” It is difficult to imagine a less conventional line item for a technical SEO firm, which is precisely why the partnership is memorable.
The search box escapes
Now the specialist faces a paradox. Optimising won focus by choosing SEO, just as SEO stopped belonging only to search engines. Its answer is to stretch the category without abandoning the craft. Content still needs clear structure. Brands still need authority. Crawlers still need to render pages. But reporting must now ask whether a company appears in generated answers, whether those mentions are accurate, and whether AI referrals do anything useful after arriving.
Campaign figures published by Optimising. Time periods, starting points, and mixes of work differ, so comparison is directional only.
The agency's recent research makes the restraint visible. In a 12-month analysis of 115 Australian brands and 24.8 million sessions, Optimising reported that identifiable AI traffic had grown rapidly yet represented only 0.1% of ecommerce revenue. ChatGPT supplied most identifiable visits but converted worst; smaller streams from Perplexity and Gemini bought at higher rates. The practical conclusion is not “AI replaces Google.” It is that “AI traffic” conceals several audiences, and that measurement should follow commercial behaviour rather than mentions alone.
A narrow firm with a wide field of view
Optimising sits between boutique consultants and full-service agencies. It is small enough to make technical specialisation plausible, yet its public work reaches enterprise systems and multiple countries. The alternatives are straightforward: hire an in-house search team, engage another specialist, or place SEO inside a larger digital agency. Optimising's case rests on depth, early involvement, and an ethical framework with external checks.
What can another company copy? Not the bandicoot. Copy the mechanics. Choose one problem worth becoming unusually good at. Put the specialist in the room while choices remain reversible. Translate work into customer and revenue outcomes. Turn values into percentages, procurement rules, and assessments. Then publish enough detail that a skeptical reader can see where the result came from.
The amusing thing about SEO is that success looks like nothing happened. The site launched and traffic did not collapse. The hungry customer found the nearby restaurant. The shoe appeared under the right question. The endangered marsupial kept turning the soil. Optimising has built a company around making those quiet outcomes count.